/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>450822

I had this cool idea once.
I was like.. What's the smallest number of digits we could encode information in? Well.. Let's see we would obviously need more than 1 digit or else all the info would be the same... Can I do it with just 2 digits?

Turns out you can, for fun I called them true and false.

So I played around a bit and make all this cool with it. People thought I was crazy and were all like "The Arabics already have this cool system that works really well cause it has the same number of digits as we have fingers."

But whatever haters gonna hate.

Fast forward several hundred years.

I had another idea based on my old idea (yes I was still alive but that's another story all together and I don't want to get off topic.).

I was like... What if I could encode an electrical signal.. Like a radio wave in my two state encoding system. I can have it describe the amplitude at a certain point... I'll have to work out a good clock system to make sure the frequencies don't get skewed but wow... Now I can potentially make music with nothing but true and false.

Then they later some people made these mechanical machines that worked on some strange new alchemy called semiconductor doping. But it turns out it worked perfectly with my encoding system.

So I told some people about my idea and they were like "I bet we can put it on some wavy reflective shit and it'll make all kinds of cool rainbowy colors and be totally rad." (it was the 80s by this time so I was like whatever).

Then they had these amazing beams of light and would tell if the wavyness was there or not. It was like a super thin phonographic record.

But pretty soon after that, people decided they didn't need the wavy rainbow phonograph they would just write down all my true or falses all in a row and have these little overpriced white fruit music players read it really fast.

I can see a lot of interesting applications for this.

>>450822

You can record on ANYTHING you can shape or apply an electrical charge/magnetic field to.

Literally anything.

But yeah, no, you're basically thinking of a CD. Or DVD. Or record. Or any of the myriad disk-format storage systems.

>>450822
Yes, I think you could say it has been done.

>>450898
What if we used a square?

>>450905
McDonalds did it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agr0a-G26dY

I know you can record on clay via mythbusters. It seems that if you had a device able to strengthen and focus vibrations into solid matter. Of course it would have to be powerful enough to get into the steel and create the grooves.

>>450909
And then your mind was blown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Q88uTdgWY

See: Wax cylinders

a while back i made a analog echo machine using a platter from a old hard drive and a bunch of tape recorder heads. echo speed was changed by the speed of the spinning disc.

>>450907
Yeah, those used to come in cereal boxes and shit
I have a Ghostbusters sweepstakes one and a Time Life "great men of music" sampler one

>>450822
That's more or less how hard drives work.

>>450957
>That's more or less how hard drives work

No its not, they work solely with magnetic effects.
The disks dont need to be of metal, and often arent.

>>450986
OP didn't say "recording by physically altering the structure of the medium".

>>451010
OP here. I mean, magnetic recording. I'm thinking of some sort of analog sampler, flip it into record mode, hit a key, and record anything onto the drum, flip it into play, and then play it back.
Record/play head would be mounted to the key and the drum would continuously spinning.
Also had in mind a reverb machine, with record and play heads in close proximity to each other on the drum, and an erase head. Varying the current to the erase head would control how much of the signal would be lost on each time around, controlling the decay of the sound.

>>451055
That would be one crazy delay (not reverb by the way). This is the kind of project I wanna hear about!

I guess the magnetization would distribute to the whole disc, thus loss of information. Maybe you could get some weak distorted sound - that would be cool. Just make the device and test discs of different materials.

Fields need to be a lot stronger than in the magnetic tape playhead. So you might need a big bulky coil box. In fact just make everything bigger so it's easier to get a decent accuracy.

Pic unrelated, probably

>>451102
>(not reverb by the way)
Well, the way I thought of it, is that the signal would pass the play head, come back around the drum, get recorded over WITHOUT being erased, and then get played again mixed with the signal that was currently being recorded.
It would get muddled and sound like crap after a few passes, but that's what the erase coil is for, to make sure signal gets erased after a few passes.
I'm thinking I'll make all custom coils instead of pulling the heads from a tape deck. Where do you think I could find a uniform steel wheel to use as a recording medium?

>>451105
I think I'd just use found objects, heh. No, really, can't you buy metal plate from just about any hardware shop?

Would be cool to get some oscilloscope readings of it. Record a sine wave and measure the response. To tell exactly how well different materials can be used as recoding media.

>>451105
Yes and, when you write on this inaccurate medium at one point, the field will also affect (muddle) everything on all the other points that aren't touching the playhead, so I guess it has a reverb effect in that sense.

Generally a reverb is something like the muffling of sound in a hall, or a spring, etc., and where there's a line you read/write/manipulate at different points it is a delay... But use whatever word you will as this is anyway a bit exceptional.

>>451107
OOH, you mean to record on the side of it? See I was thinking something like pic related, recording drums used in old telephone systems. But your idea is better, I wouldn't have to worry about turning it true on a metal lathe I don't have.

>>451109
OK yeah I got it wrong, was thinking a disc, like in a vinyl player, with a big magnet instead of the needle.
But I don't know which would work better. Maybe disc is easier to implement, depends on what you got. The interference might be worse on it though.

>>451114
Well, the drum would be pretty hard since I don't have a metal lathe. I can try with a disc, though. As for the magnet, a torid with a notch cut out of it can make a play head and record head, if I'm not mistaken. And a regular old solenoid coil would be a good erase head.
If I control my levels carefully, I can't imagine that interference would be that bad of a problem. I can record at a low level and then amplify upon playback.

>>450944
sounds like a project that deserves its own thread

>>451120
Do you mean this (From Wikipedia) :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_head

"
A head consists of a core of magnetic material arranged into a doughnut shape or toroid, into which a very narrow gap has been let. This gap is filled with a diamagnetic material, such as gold. This forces the magnetic flux out of the gap into the magnetic tape medium more than air would [...]
"

I don't really understand all of the article, but I think it contains the secret to it.

>I can record at a low level and then amplify upon playback.

Maybe true, but I suppose if the material isn't optimal, it needs a stronger field to magnetize it. So I guess you should have a high power record head anyway. You can use it at low power if it works.

Apparently the material should be paramagnetic. So steel might not work after all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramagnetic

>>451143
>Apparently the material should be paramagnetic. So steel might not work after all.
The very first recorders, wire recorders, used steel wire. So I know it's possible.